Late at night (a long time ago) they used to flash a sign on the television that said something like, “It’s 10 O’Clock, Do you know where your children are?” This dates me, I know.

When I was a ten-year-old kid, I was wandering the streets of Bangkok, Thailand, unaccompanied and alone, getting in fights, visiting an animal exporters compound where I was attacked by a gibbon. (I have very strange feelings about Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.)

If I let a ten year-old child wander the streets of Albuquerque, today, I wouldn’t be too surprised to hear from Child Protective Services.

Oddly enough, here in the US of A, it’s never been safer for kids to wander around but we are very aware of the things that could happen to them, things that weren’t really talked about when I was a kid.

I feel I’m pretty well off because of the freedom I had. As a junior in high school I’d drive three hours into Nashville to shop for shoes (running shoes) that you couldn’t get where I lived. Again, alone.

It’s a free music-streaming site that analyzes the DNA of songs and artists to let you create and modify a ‘station’ that will play music based on your criteria. They have over 400,000 songs in their database. I’ve discovered a lot of music by artists that I would never otherwise have heard of.

Once you sign up, you can create up to a hundred stations. You can also find the most popular stations shared by other users and tap into their streams.

It’s easily the most interesting music site out there, IMHO.

One genre that I’ve enjoyed lately is Southern Gothic Rock exemplified by the now-defunct 16 Horsepower. I was blown away by the video of ‘Hutterite Mile’ on a Paste Magazine DVD. It was all over the net for awhile, but it looks like the vid and the free MP3 download have been pulled everywhere.

Though Pandora won’t play ‘Hutterite Mile’, you might try creating a station based on it to get the flavor.

…Also, if you’re willing to give up one of your e-mail addresses to them, Paste has lots of indy-music MP3’s available for free download.